Today we worked on moving between all the different placements we have worked on in order to get ready for our Fall concert! Because every placement that we do is an extension of our baseline/forward placement - switching genres, styles, or speed of a song isn't strenuous on our vocal cords, it is however a bit of a brain teaser at first. In our Fall concert, we have made sure to pick different kinds of songs so that we can show off all the different parts of Estelle's awesome voice! Our main focus today was "Think of me" - getting into our classical placement coming from a more dense, powerful sound from our pop ballad and getting to a more lifted bright classical sound. With each song we sing, we use a slightly different part of our placement in an extreme way:
My immortal: This is our big pop ballad. The main focus of this song is the big powerful notes (making the big triangle with our mouth, and adding "ah" to the middle of our vowels to get a big sound without having to add unhealthy pressure to our vocal cords). In the verses, we widen the vowel (as we will in our other pop songs), and adopt a lazy- kind of style where we talk and soften the pronunciation of our words to make it sound more effortless and cool.
We also decided that this would be the song we're going to use a microphone stand on!
Think of me: This is our classical song! With this song, we focus on backing off of our loud belt placement to a more soft belt placement - to make our transitions between our low and high notes seamless. We focus on lifting our soft pallet and widening the roof of our mouth to give our sound the brightest and fullest sound possible. We spread the tone out singing it through our teeth and adding an "ah" vowel to the middle of our words (taking out any shrillness that can come with singing that high).
Step sister's lament: We will get into the placement and performance of this song next lesson!
Performance technique: switching things up
As we are working on switching between placements - we are also working on switching up our performance technique so that every song looks a little bit different on stage!
My immortal: With this song, we have added a microphone stand. We worked on different places for Estelle to put her hands on and around the stand and the frequency in which she should switch between the moves. (mapped out last lesson)
Think of me: This song, we are focusing on more fluid and happy movements - working on adding microphone drops so that Estelle looks in control, and arm movement that switches up the rhythm of the song so she has options other than swaying to the song.